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Five Myths About China (That I’m Sorry I Helped Spread)

Chinese students ace standardized tests, but they can’t think creatively. For the second time, students in Shanghai occupy the top spot this year on international tests of reading, science and math. The news inspires complaints about American performance (U.S. students scored near or below average) and criticism that one of China’s richest cities doesn’t reflect the gaps across the country.

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True, but the headlines miss a deeper change: Chinese parents are looking beyond rote learning in search of alternative education that promotes critical thinking and creativity. When I went to Europe with first-time Chinese tourists, a mother, Zeng Liping, told me that teachers had frowned upon her taking her sixth grader. “Before every school vacation, the teachers tell them, ‘Don’t go out. Stay at home and study, because very soon you’ll be taking the exam to get into middle school.’” But Zeng’s generation has evolving priorities. She quit a stable job as an art teacher and put her savings into starting a fashion label. “My bosses all said, ‘What a shame that you’re leaving a good workplace.’ But I’ve proved to myself that I made the right choice.”

The only people in China who care about dissidents like Ai Weiwei are foreign correspondents. Why, I am often asked, do foreign correspondents devote a disproportionate share of their column inches to the quixotic struggles of lawyers, intellectuals and eccentrics who challenge a government that, for all its faults, has allowed more people in history to climb out of poverty?

Here’s why: Popularity is a poor way to measure the impact of an idea in a country that censors ideas. In the case of Ai Weiwei, for instance, a team of Harvard researchers foundthat news of the dissident artist’s arrest in 2011 was one of the most heavily censored items of the year, which undermines the idea that people in China paid no attention to his arrest. Ai Weiwei’s way of life is emphatically outside the mainstream – he speaks English, poses in nude photos, makes music videos—but his arguments have anticipated ideas that are broadly felt: His attempts to recognize the children killed in collapsing schools was driven by a deep sense of injustice that was among the most common complaints voiced by ordinary Chinese, not just by the urban elite. When he protested a government decision to teardown his studio, in retaliation for his activism, he was giving voice to resentment to arbitrary demolitions that is widely felt.

There is an obvious danger in overstating the impact of dissent in China, but ignoring it blinds us to risks and vulnerabilities that will shape China’s future no less profoundly as its strengths.

China’s economy is doomed to collapse! (Unless it takes over the world!) The larger China looms in the American mind, the more we see it as a caricature, bound to fail or destined to dominate. Four years ago, when China’s GDP was growing at 10 percent per year, it was unfashionable to draw attention to its economic weakness. Today, with debt rising and growth falling, optimism is too often written off as naïve. (The calmest voices are betting that China will muddle through.)

The larger point is that we should retire the choice between absolutes. The story of China in the 21st century is often told as a contest between East and West, between state capitalism and the free market. But in the foreground there is a more immediate competition: the struggle to define the idea of China. Understanding China requires not only measuring the light and heat thrown off by its incandescent new power, but also examining the source of its energy—the men and women at the center of China’s becoming.

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), from which this article was adapted.